“A perfectly equal school system is not likely to produce equal students,” notes Barron’s Editorial Page Editor Thomas G. Donlan in an unusually strong commentary titled Another Lost Generation. Labeling No Child Left Behind a failure he notes “a proper policy must require that all children have the opportunity to be educated up to their potential.”
“Testing has identified some schools where hope had vanished. It has galvanized a few states to take over administration of a few of their worst schools,” he notes. “But such takeovers also demonstrated how hard it is for even the best-intentioned bureaucrats to overcome years of professional neglect, decades of physical deterioration and generations of parental incapacity.”
Donlan isn’t merely throwing in his lot with NCLB bashers, however. Far from it. “Many teachers and their advocates have retreated behind a wall of denial,” he writes. “Some denounce high-stakes testing, as though conducting tests without providing consequences for failure would be more useful. Others denounce the tests themselves as too difficult, as though anything could be measured by a test that all students pass. And many denounce the tests, easy or hard, for demanding too much rote regurgitation of facts, as though facts were not the first necessary bricks for building an intellectual edifice.”
One wouldn’t expect to read such a strong, clear-eyed take on education in a paper that covers investing and business. But Donlan’s diagnosis hits the bulls-eye.
“Who has been fooling whom? It seems educators and politicians and parents and students have been fooling each other, and fooling themselves,” he concludes. “Public schools that mismeasure themselves are unlikely to produce real educational achievement. And schools that mismeasure student achievement, even on such a simple scale as graduation rate, are unlikely to solve their own problems.”
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If you want a preview of an Obama presidency look to his friend, Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick, says the Weekly Standard. The magazine is a conservative organ, so it’s no surprise that authors Charles Chieppo and Jim Stergios of the Pioneer Institute, a Boston think tank, have the long knives out for Obama. Still their take on Patrick’s education moves are noteworthy.
In 2005 the Bay State was the first to place at the top of all four categories of the National Assessment of Educational Progress, attributable to the 1993 Massachusetts Education Reform Act and its hallmark standards, accountability and school choice provisions—and $40 billion dollars of incremental spending on education.
“But the teachers’ unions maintain a deep antipathy to the reforms and to anything that encourages charter schools,” write Chieppo and Stergios. “The unions pumped $3 million into Patrick’s campaign, and the governor called education his ’singular pursuit.’ What he is pursuing is the systematic dismantling of the successful 1993 reforms.” Joe Williams of Democrats for Education Reform said much the same in an op-ed in the Boston Globe in January; he rates an “I told you so” for the piece.
“His first budget eliminated the state’s independent education accountability office,” note the Standard. “Then he used his first two picks for the Board of Education to demolish standards and choice: choosing anti-testing zealot Ruth Kaplan and charter school opponent Paul Reville–whom he also made chairman of the nine-member board.”
The article is downright weak on connecting Obama to Patrick on education, noting merely that similiarities between the two “leave some to wonder” if Patrick is a preview of Obama. But its indictment of Patrick is plenty bad enough.
Good common sense from Eduwonkette on the the Bloomberg tenure track defeat. Reacting to some of the extreme blogging about it, she sounds a note of reason.
“If NYC wants to get serious about value-added, tests need to be given in September and June, and these tests need to be designed to measure growth, which NY state’s tests are not,” says EW.
I’ve resisted weighing in on this because as a former NYC teacher, I’m deeply ambivalent about it. Which is worse, no or phony accountability, or the nuance-averse, blunt instrument accountability of standardized tests? Frankly, neither one is remotely acceptable. I’m a strong supporter of muscular teacher accountability, but over my dead body would I accept being evaluated by a reading test administered short of the halfway mark in the school year. Neither would I want my efficacy gauged six months after my kids left my classroom.
A case could be made that under Bloomberg and Chancellor Klein, New York City has lived and died by standardized test scores. I can’t help but feel that this defeat is at some level the inevitable price they had to pay for their singular focus on testing.
School officials in Massachusetts want to redefine failure. Literally. “To soothe the bruised egos of educators and children in lackluster schools, Massachusetts officials are now pushing for kinder, gentler euphemisms for failure,” the Boston Globe reports. “Instead of calling these schools ‘underperforming,’ the Board of Education is considering labeling them as “Commonwealth priority,” to avoid poisoning teacher and student morale. Schools in the direst straits, now known as ‘chronically underperforming,’ would get the more urgent but still vague label of ‘priority one.’”
Leave it to the lone student representative on the board to speak truth to power. “Why are we spending time on this?,” said Zachary Tsetsos, a 17-year old senior at Oxford High School, who said he finds the debate frivolous. “I don’t want to tiptoe around the issue. I’m not concerned about what title we give these schools. Let’s work on fixing them.”
In the South Bronx community where I taught, I used to say that the schools came in three flavors: bad, worse and holy #$@!. I don’t suppose those would be useful distinctions. But they might be more accurate and convey a more appropriate sense of urgency. If it’s not a school to which you’d send your child, they only term that obtains is unacceptable.
A new report from the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation looks at the ostensibly black and white world of accountability vs. union contracts, and finds a surprising amount of grey area. The ultimate responsibility for student achievement tends to fall to principals. But do they have the power to run their buildings like true managers? The Leadership Limbo: Teacher Labor Agreements in America’s Fifty Largest School Districts looked at labor contracts in three areas—compensation, personnel policies, and work rules—and concluded that more than half of the districts studied have labor contracts that are ambiguous. “The collective bargaining agreements and the formal board policies in these districts appear to grant leaders substantial leeway to manage assertively, should they so choose,” the report concludes. Only 15 of the 50 contracts studied are deemed “restrictive or highly restrictive.”
“Districts with high concentrations of poor and minority students tend to have more restrictive contracts than other districts, the report notes. “Another alarming indication of inequity along racial and class lines.”
In Fordham’s Education Gadfly, Checker Finn and Michael Petrilli opine that they tend to see the situation “as more good than bad, for it means, at least in the short run, that aggressive superintendents and principals could push the envelope and claim authority for any management prerogative not barred outright by the labor agreements. And it means that, for a majority of big districts, the depiction of The Contract as an all-powerful, insurmountable barrier to reform may be overstated.”
Stay tuned.
George Cunningham throws down a gauntlet at the feet of state policy makers in an interview with Michael F. Shaughnessy of ednews.org, noting that ed schools are effectively thwarting standards-based education and accountability.
A former professor in the Department of Educational and Counseling Psychology at the University of Louisville, Cunningham, recently issued a paper critical of teacher training at education schools in North Carolina and nationwide. While the public and policy-makers demand greater accountability, ed schools “do not think that academic achievement is an important purpose for schools,” he says. “They are committed to the achievement of a set of non-academic goals such as diversity, technology, critical thinking skills, and social justice.”
In plain but powerful terms Cunningham describes the disconnect between the accountability message being preached by the public and policy-makers and what new teachers are bringing to their jobs. “Newly minted teachers come out of education schools either with no awareness of the importance of academic achievement tests or with an acquired hostility towards them,” he notes, calling the situation “unsustainable.”
Continue reading ‘Ed Schools: Undermining Accountability?’
Back in the day, the key to being a successful principal was to be a successful politician. Now, says Nelson Coulter, principal of Hendrickson High School in Pflugerville, Texas they’re like coaches. “You have to win,” he says.
The insightful quote is from a Austin American-Statesman piece on principal turnover. School districts nationwide are finding it harder to hold on to principals as standards get tougher and the list of demands from the state and federal governments gets longer. In Texas, the paper reports, “about 61 percent of high school principals leave their schools or the field within three years; by the fifth year, that figure increases to 76 percent.”
“We know that school reform takes time — much more than one year’s time,” says Ed Fuller, associate director of the University Council for Educational Administration at the University of Texas. “If a principal leaves within three to five years, the principal’s vision for reform is left incomplete. Over time, teachers become jaded and simply ignore the reform effort….Teachers believe the principal will leave and all of their efforts will be wasted.”
Plus, while principals put pressure on teachers to deliver accountability outcomes, teachers rarely lose their jobs over low accountability ratings, Fuller notes. “Principals do.”
I have been watching the renewed hostilities between Eduwonk and Eduwonkette this week over the issue of No Child Left Behind’s impact on curriculum. I feel honor-bound to weigh in, since I inadvertently started the fight. A few thoughts on their posts:
The issue of whether testing has crowded science and social studies off the curriculum is beyond dispute, and I’m not swayed by the argument that if 44% of schools report a narrowing of the curriculum under NCLB, then the legislation is not the culprit, since 56% report no deleterious impact. If 44% of patients reported an adverse reaction to a medication, it would be off the shelves before the sun set. So it’s a problem.
Eduwonk is absolutely correct, however, in noting that good schools focus on curriculum and instruction. “While low-capacity schools may have spent time on social studies pre-NCLB,” he writes, “it’s a safe bet that many of them were not teaching it very well.” But the opposite is also true: most good schools were good schools without any external accountability measures whatsoever, so that’s not where our focus belongs. If the functional structures are in place — strong leadership, good teachers, active oversight, engaged parents who are informed consumers of education, etc. — there are multiple levels of quality control to assure good outcomes. NCLB is all about making bad schools act more like good ones in the absence of those self-policing mechanisms.
Continue reading ‘Wonk vs. Wonk’
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